Fancy passing + Draymond suspension reaction
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Fancy passing + Draymond suspension reaction
Jokić? DeRozan? Best pass of the season so far? Let's have a little fun before the serious stuff
I love passing.
It's my favorite thing to see on a basketball court.
Silky long-range shooting is up there, too, but I would put a delicious dime above anything: Posterization dunks, merciless shot rejections, gravity-defying drives for layups a la Julius Erving in the 1980 NBA Finals. You name it.
So ...
The opening week of the season was wonderfully crazy because we got an instant Shot of the Season contender from Luka Dončić with a jump hook/shot put off the glass from more than 30 feet out against Brooklyn as well as an instant Pass of the Season nominee from Nikola Jokić.
It was legitimately fair to wonder out loud, before the calendar had even flipped to November, if this Jokić touchdown to Aaron Gordon — The Joker's sideline out-of-bounds strike to set up Gordon to slam home an alley-oop some 75 feet down the floor — would stand as the best dime seen all season.
Then on Monday night in Chicago, DeMar DeRozan sent that whole script to rewrite.
DeRozan's spinning-in-the-lane, no-look fling out to Coby White for a corner 3 was plenty delicious, too.
I give the edge to Jokić's pass, which you can agree or disagree with below, but the larger takeaway here is: Someone might actually top both of these over the 150 days left in this regular season. We shouldn't assume anything in #thisleague.
PS for Passing Devotees — Indiana's Tyrese Haliburton just rung up 32 assists against zero turnovers in back-to-back games against Philadelphia. According to Basketball Reference, no NBA player has done that since 1967-68.
The previous best in this category was 31 assists without a turnover as achieved both by Jason Williams (with Memphis in 2003) and Kevin Porter (New Jersey in 1978), with John Lucas at 29 for San Antonio in 1984. Jason Kidd (Phoenix in 1998) and Kevin Johnson (Phoenix in 1996) had two-game stretches with 27 assists and zero turnovers.
Haliburton's previous best, as shown on this Basketball Reference list, was 26 assists against zero turnovers in a two-game stretch for the Pacers early last season.
The Draymond Green Suspension
A five-game suspension for Golden State’s Draymond Green for putting Minnesota’s Rudy Gobert in a headlock Tuesday night and pulling him down the floor for nearly 10 seconds marked the first time in a L-O-N-G time that a punishment meted out by the league office proved more severe than I was expecting.
For full reaction to the suspension, as well as lots of talk about the LA Clippers’ 0-5 struggles and Chicago’s potential trade options with Zach LaVine and other Bulls, check out my latest #thisleague UNCUT podcast alongside Turner Sports’ Chris Haynes.
Fancy passing + Draymond suspension reaction
On Draymond's suspension.. as a Warrior fan, sadly, I was prepared for this being a 5 game or so suspension. The league showed their hand citing "past history" with Green's suspension during last year's playoff run, and while I had no issue with Draymond jumping in to protect Klay initially, the 9-10 seconds he held onto Gobert made it clearly excessive. I was hoping for 3, but a lot of Dub Nation were ready for the league to give him the 5 gamer.
I didn't agree that Klay and McDaniels should have been tossed. Double Tehcnical? Yes. But Gobert putting hands on Klay (instead of pulling McDaniels off) and Dray then over-reacting probably affected the refs thinking.
I like Derozan's purely on the aesthetics and degree of athletic difficulty. Jokic was a head's up play, and, while 75' alley-oops are not easy by any stretch, I think it was more just the unexpected nature of it than a truly high-degree of difficulty pass.
A few other notes on fancy passes.
1) One of my favorite type of 'passes' is not a singular pass, but the bang-bang-bang, hockey-assist/harlem globetrotter like multi-pass sequence. The Warriors had one against Cleveland the other night, where Steph no-looked a dime to Dray in the paint, and Dray rainbowed the ball immediately over his defender for GP2 to climb the ladder and throw down a reverse slam. Washington had a really nice one, too earlier in the year where Denny Avidja made a nice cross-court bounce pass to Poole on a fast break, and Poole immediately lofted it towards the rim for Kuzma to finish the alley-oop.
2) Speaking of Avidja, he's one of those jack-of-all trade players, master of none, but if I were to single out one skill that stands out in his repertoire above all else, it is his passing. He makes a lot of no-look behind the back passes in transition that seem to come within the flow of the game (i.e., not flamboyant or risky), and his ability to see the floor leads to a lot of nice assists. It's a shame the Wizards seem lost on offense, as a whole, though, as within the right system, he might flourish with his IQ.
3) A few other passes I've liked this year include:
- Steph's no-look alley-oop from behind the 3-pt arc to a back-cutting GP2
- Marcus Smart diving to the ground for a loose ball (as you'd expect Smart to do), but then flipping it backwards to a teammate as he slid across the floor for an easy bucket.
- Kyrie Irving's literal 'touch' pass that re-directed a Doncic pass up towards the rim for Derrick Jones Jr. to slam home